The ads/memes/tiktoks/etc. against Elon Musk need to start today. The Democratic party should be running them, but since they won't, everyone else needs to do it.
Simon, your talk last night was wonderful and I suspect that I'll listen to the last 15 or so minutes over and over again. Thank you for what you do.
WTF would any sane Republican wish to be Speaker of the House with the Chaos Caucus driving America off the fiscal cliff and no viable, meaningful demand in hand to resolve the crisis? What is it that they want? They have had months to resolve their demands and negotiate a bill that would avert a year-end crisis. It would only have extended funding for several months and address serious short term dire needs. Now... they abandon an agreement they reached for what? Not a GD thing. The Republican Party is revealed as the Grinch who stole Christmas. Merry Grinchmas to America courtesy of Republicans.
Thanks, Simon. I will listen to your talk as I couldn’t last night.
something that I have come to believe is that Joe Biden was partly responsible for our loss. I say this as someone who really likes him and wanted him to stay in the race. He should never have run for a second term. He also didn’t trumpet his many successes.
Unfortunately, he lost support with the Afghanistan pull out. While not really his fault, he was operating under the terms poorly negotiated by Trump, the chaos of the withdrawal really hurt him and he never recovered. I don’t know if it could have been done better, but it was a mess and he took the blame.
I totally agree. Moreover, given the horribly challenging circumstances created by Trump, I would go so far as to call the 2021 Kabul Airlift a huge success. Over 122,000 were evacuated to safety, many of them Afghans who had done their utmost to help the American and Allied militaries. All in all, the number of casualties during the evacuation was negligible.
Does anyone for a moment believe Trump would have evacuated that many people to safety? He would have abandoned our Afghan helpers, leaving them in the lurch to face the wrath of the Taliban!
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards, and it requires convincing people to vote for you in elections. . . .
Rather than mainstream progressive advocacy groups working to amplify Joe Biden’s message and create good press for him, they threaten him and other Democrats with bad press unless they hew to progressive orthodoxy. This is done in collaboration with progressive staffers and like-minded journalists. . . .
The idea of a policy and messaging infrastructure that exists to coordinate people in favor of the White House’s approach has fallen by the wayside. Instead, progressive donors built a policy and messaging infrastructure whose main theory of action is to attack Democrats so that they find themselves worrying that efforts to become more popular (and therefore more electorally successful) may actually backfire.
Plenty of the blame for the resulting dynamic does lie with the elected officials themselves. Pressure from the groups is a partial explanation for Biden’s drift and mistakes in key areas, but it’s not an excuse. A stronger leader would have done better. But it is also true that he didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. Donors shifted their theory of change from one that emphasized winning elections and passing big bills to one that emphasized ideological purism and case-by-case maximalism.
Please provide evidence. I think Biden's legislative accomplishments came BECAUSE progressive ideas are widely popular. I also believe that many, many factors played into Harris' loss. There wasn't just one.
Glad to see this column. BUT AS USUAL Democrats can’t get an attack message out. Only long rambling carefully worded sentences. Those are useless. Every day MAGA controls the narrative
Well, this was likely done more as a prank to insult the senators more than anything else. Remember Caligula's story was told by Suetonius, and we have no idea how accurate it was; he included all the gossip. There was no fact checking in those days.
Also re strategy -- Yesterday's events make clear that Elon Musk is functionally a co-president, with Trump following his lead, per Josh Marshall at TPM https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trumps-trump Full quote:
As you’ve likely seen, things kind of went off the rails today on Capitol Hill. Speaker Mike Johnson had assembled one of those big spending packages to avoid a government shutdown. Then Elon Musk went off on the bill and started a stampede for the exits among House Republicans. Then Trump turned against it too. Then JD Vance. By the end of the day, it was clear not only that the bill was dead. There was a real question about whether Johnson’s speakership will survive the vote for speaker coming up on January 3rd.
But none of those points are the critical ones. This is about Elon Musk.
Trump has brought Musk into the central circle of power. He’s not only de facto Vice President. When was the last time you saw JD Vance? He’s practically co-president. Musk is erratic, volatile, impulsive, mercurial. He introduces a huge source of unpredictability and chaos into the presidency that for once Trump doesn’t control. See it clearly: Musk did this. Trump thrives on chaos, but his chaos. Not someone else’s chaos.
Trump is following. He’s trying to pretend otherwise but he’s following. And unlike all of Trump’s other bad hires or hires he gets tired of, he can’t just shitcan Musk like all the rest. Musk is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. He’s got a bigger megaphone. And he’s got his own brand. I’m pretty sure there will eventually be a really big and really ugly falling out between the two of them. But it will take a while to get there and the costs are potentially quite large for both of them.
IMHO Musk may be vulnerable.In September, DOJ asserted that Sergey Kiriyenko had created some 30 internet domains to spread Russian disinformation, including on Elon Musk’s X which was formerly known as Twitter. In October, the Wall Street Journal disclosed that Musk had been in contact with Kiriyenko and Vladimir Putin which Dmitry Peskov affirmed.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Kiriyenko
Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin said he had interfered in U.S. elections and would continue doing so in future, We have interfered (in U.S. elections), we are interfering and we will continue to interfere. Carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do." https://www.reuters.com/world/us/russias-prigozhin-admits-interfering-us-elections-2022-11-07/ What does Musk know and if he does know, when did he know it?
Simon, have you read Malcom Nance’s piece on Focused Actions with Focused Objectives? I feel like this gives us a way to object to the things that might be coming. We can be the change makers if we unite! Thoughts?
The real Trump/Musk/MAGA/GOP agenda arrived early for Christmas. It's simple.. Let's have a War on the Poor so we can get those tax cuts to the billionaires they so desperately need. We have entered The Age of the Great Grift of America. Dragging 50% of American down won't end well for the great maga movement.
"President Musk orders disaster relief cut, sees those afflicted by hurricanes and fires as not having a 'growth hacking mindset'."
Kinzinger: “President Musk said he doesn’t want Republicans to pass this, and Vice President Trump backed him up.”
Democrats can complain all they want, but President Musk was given a clear mandate by the American voters in November
"Who won the election — President Trump or President Musk? The American people deserve to know who’s going to be in charge."
"One upside of President Musk and his sidekick Donald blowing up the spending bill before Christmas is they’ll arrive in DC with seriously decreased congressional leverage," said Bechloss.
"And just like that, Republican Unelected Co-President Elon Musk has killed the bill to keep the government from shutting down on Friday. All he had to do was make a few social media posts. Trump said he’d empower working people, all he’s done is empower the ultra wealthy." - Rep. Frost
A similar campaign undermined Steve Bannon. In fact, people were encouraged to send mail addressed to: "President Bannon, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue". Hard to say how much this contributed to Bannon’s demise, but he was compelled to leave not long after this.
excellent presentation last evening with simon. everyone should listen today if u missed it. also, fantastic reporting by lawrence o'donnell last nite on satan/fusk killing bi partisan funding bill. he really cheers me up and gives me hope! satan will have to lift the debt ceiling to give the oligarchs their tax gift! dems today should be telling all the people in states hurt by natural disasters that repubs killed $100B for relief efforts. name the states. do it locally. let them all know who killed the bill. everytime they hurt the american people the dems need to shine a spotlight and megaphone on it!
Regarding Musk, I saw a suggestion elsewhere this morning, I believe in TCinLA's substack that we now should be referring to President Musk and Vice President Trump. That reflects who is actually in charge, and it would drive Frump crazy.
For years, Republicans have been professing concern about the national debt – and, during every budget negotiation, Republican legislators have used their unwillingness to raise the debt ceiling as a cudgel to extract budget concessions from the Democrats.
Now suddenly Trump demands Congress *eliminate* the debt ceiling?? This is an alarming signal that he has some very bad plans for America’s economy – and for your economy and my economy.
The headline on the front page of the local newspaper today is “Trusting in Trump - President Elects’ Voters Mostly Trust in His Cabinet Picks.” The goal of many people who voted Trump this time around (not just MAGA) is to shake up the government and create change. I have my doubts that these understand how much hurt this may actually cause them personally. Unfortunately, I think that for many people who voted for Trump, the only way that they will believe he is bad for them is through adverse consequences and personal pain. I often wonder if the chips need to fall where they may before anything others say or do regarding Trump’s destructiveness matters. If people think Kash Patel and Pete Hegsforth are good nominees, then I think consequences may be the only thing Trump voters may understand.
Also, I haven’t seen much commentary from Democratic leaders about where we go from here regarding cultural issues. According to Ruy Teixeira in “The Free Press” , one exit poll sited that people could not relate to Democrats on cultural issues as the third greatest reason for why they voted Trump. The economy and immigration were first and second. Teixeira says “Because many of today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues to be real issues. Instead, they see them as fictions, distractions, or expressions of bigotry that are to be opposed, not indulged.” He says Democrats are missing the message voters sent them.
You would do well to ignore Ruy Teixeira. AS Stewart Stevens said, we lost an election, but we were not wrong. Propaganda was probably worse this election than ever before. Many voters thought we were in a recession, that immigrants were committing lots of violent crime, and that Harris was shaping up to be a woke blue haired trans advocate ( Sam Harris' characterization, not mine ). But hey, I'm sure pet owners all over the country are feeling better about their cats and dogs......
The ads/memes/tiktoks/etc. against Elon Musk need to start today. The Democratic party should be running them, but since they won't, everyone else needs to do it.
Simon, your talk last night was wonderful and I suspect that I'll listen to the last 15 or so minutes over and over again. Thank you for what you do.
WTF would any sane Republican wish to be Speaker of the House with the Chaos Caucus driving America off the fiscal cliff and no viable, meaningful demand in hand to resolve the crisis? What is it that they want? They have had months to resolve their demands and negotiate a bill that would avert a year-end crisis. It would only have extended funding for several months and address serious short term dire needs. Now... they abandon an agreement they reached for what? Not a GD thing. The Republican Party is revealed as the Grinch who stole Christmas. Merry Grinchmas to America courtesy of Republicans.
Thanks, Simon. I will listen to your talk as I couldn’t last night.
something that I have come to believe is that Joe Biden was partly responsible for our loss. I say this as someone who really likes him and wanted him to stay in the race. He should never have run for a second term. He also didn’t trumpet his many successes.
Unfortunately, he lost support with the Afghanistan pull out. While not really his fault, he was operating under the terms poorly negotiated by Trump, the chaos of the withdrawal really hurt him and he never recovered. I don’t know if it could have been done better, but it was a mess and he took the blame.
There were many, many factors in Democrats' (very narrow) loss in the presidential race. I don't think you can pin it all on Afghanistan. IMHO.
Agreed and that wasn’t my point. Joe’s slide in approval started with the Afghanistan withdrawal and never recovered.
I totally agree. Moreover, given the horribly challenging circumstances created by Trump, I would go so far as to call the 2021 Kabul Airlift a huge success. Over 122,000 were evacuated to safety, many of them Afghans who had done their utmost to help the American and Allied militaries. All in all, the number of casualties during the evacuation was negligible.
Does anyone for a moment believe Trump would have evacuated that many people to safety? He would have abandoned our Afghan helpers, leaving them in the lurch to face the wrath of the Taliban!
All true, but the public perception was very different. Biden’s approval rating took a big hit and never recovered, but I repeat myself.
Simon -- Would you look at and comment on Matt Yglesias' take on why Harris lost, which he posted yesterday on Slow Boring: https://www.slowboring.com/p/from-the-veal-pen-to-the-groups
Excerpts:
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards, and it requires convincing people to vote for you in elections. . . .
Rather than mainstream progressive advocacy groups working to amplify Joe Biden’s message and create good press for him, they threaten him and other Democrats with bad press unless they hew to progressive orthodoxy. This is done in collaboration with progressive staffers and like-minded journalists. . . .
The idea of a policy and messaging infrastructure that exists to coordinate people in favor of the White House’s approach has fallen by the wayside. Instead, progressive donors built a policy and messaging infrastructure whose main theory of action is to attack Democrats so that they find themselves worrying that efforts to become more popular (and therefore more electorally successful) may actually backfire.
Plenty of the blame for the resulting dynamic does lie with the elected officials themselves. Pressure from the groups is a partial explanation for Biden’s drift and mistakes in key areas, but it’s not an excuse. A stronger leader would have done better. But it is also true that he didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. Donors shifted their theory of change from one that emphasized winning elections and passing big bills to one that emphasized ideological purism and case-by-case maximalism.
Oblivious to psy ops.
Please provide evidence. I think Biden's legislative accomplishments came BECAUSE progressive ideas are widely popular. I also believe that many, many factors played into Harris' loss. There wasn't just one.
Glad to see this column. BUT AS USUAL Democrats can’t get an attack message out. Only long rambling carefully worded sentences. Those are useless. Every day MAGA controls the narrative
These kinds of posts are deeply unwelcome here. Our job is to encourage smart behavior not throw our hands up in the air and whine.
We're in the "Incitatus is becoming a senator" phase of this dark time, aren't we...?
Well, this was likely done more as a prank to insult the senators more than anything else. Remember Caligula's story was told by Suetonius, and we have no idea how accurate it was; he included all the gossip. There was no fact checking in those days.
Dark times, indeed – and that’s straight from the horse’s mouth.
Also re strategy -- Yesterday's events make clear that Elon Musk is functionally a co-president, with Trump following his lead, per Josh Marshall at TPM https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trumps-trump Full quote:
As you’ve likely seen, things kind of went off the rails today on Capitol Hill. Speaker Mike Johnson had assembled one of those big spending packages to avoid a government shutdown. Then Elon Musk went off on the bill and started a stampede for the exits among House Republicans. Then Trump turned against it too. Then JD Vance. By the end of the day, it was clear not only that the bill was dead. There was a real question about whether Johnson’s speakership will survive the vote for speaker coming up on January 3rd.
But none of those points are the critical ones. This is about Elon Musk.
Trump has brought Musk into the central circle of power. He’s not only de facto Vice President. When was the last time you saw JD Vance? He’s practically co-president. Musk is erratic, volatile, impulsive, mercurial. He introduces a huge source of unpredictability and chaos into the presidency that for once Trump doesn’t control. See it clearly: Musk did this. Trump thrives on chaos, but his chaos. Not someone else’s chaos.
Trump is following. He’s trying to pretend otherwise but he’s following. And unlike all of Trump’s other bad hires or hires he gets tired of, he can’t just shitcan Musk like all the rest. Musk is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. He’s got a bigger megaphone. And he’s got his own brand. I’m pretty sure there will eventually be a really big and really ugly falling out between the two of them. But it will take a while to get there and the costs are potentially quite large for both of them.
IMHO Musk may be vulnerable.In September, DOJ asserted that Sergey Kiriyenko had created some 30 internet domains to spread Russian disinformation, including on Elon Musk’s X which was formerly known as Twitter. In October, the Wall Street Journal disclosed that Musk had been in contact with Kiriyenko and Vladimir Putin which Dmitry Peskov affirmed.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Kiriyenko
Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin said he had interfered in U.S. elections and would continue doing so in future, We have interfered (in U.S. elections), we are interfering and we will continue to interfere. Carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do." https://www.reuters.com/world/us/russias-prigozhin-admits-interfering-us-elections-2022-11-07/ What does Musk know and if he does know, when did he know it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2024_United_States_elections
Did Musk violate both state and federal election law? In Pa, the penalty can be 7 years in a workhouse.
Simon, have you read Malcom Nance’s piece on Focused Actions with Focused Objectives? I feel like this gives us a way to object to the things that might be coming. We can be the change makers if we unite! Thoughts?
https://open.substack.com/pub/malcolmnance/p/forming-the-new-american-resistance?r=85dg&utm_medium=ios
Jennifer Rubin has a terrific article on Senator-elect Ruben Gallego in today’s edition of the Washington Post.
. I talked to Ruben Gallego. Democrats should listen to him.
"How did Gallego beat the Senate odds in a tough swing state? With a few good practices."
Gift link to article:
https://wapo.st/3ZITPEu
The real Trump/Musk/MAGA/GOP agenda arrived early for Christmas. It's simple.. Let's have a War on the Poor so we can get those tax cuts to the billionaires they so desperately need. We have entered The Age of the Great Grift of America. Dragging 50% of American down won't end well for the great maga movement.
"President Musk orders disaster relief cut, sees those afflicted by hurricanes and fires as not having a 'growth hacking mindset'."
Kinzinger: “President Musk said he doesn’t want Republicans to pass this, and Vice President Trump backed him up.”
Democrats can complain all they want, but President Musk was given a clear mandate by the American voters in November
"Who won the election — President Trump or President Musk? The American people deserve to know who’s going to be in charge."
"One upside of President Musk and his sidekick Donald blowing up the spending bill before Christmas is they’ll arrive in DC with seriously decreased congressional leverage," said Bechloss.
"And just like that, Republican Unelected Co-President Elon Musk has killed the bill to keep the government from shutting down on Friday. All he had to do was make a few social media posts. Trump said he’d empower working people, all he’s done is empower the ultra wealthy." - Rep. Frost
It's starting. It's meme-ing.
Safe bet: The more Musk is called Pres. Musk, the sooner Trump will want to sideline him, although that ship might have sailed.
A similar campaign undermined Steve Bannon. In fact, people were encouraged to send mail addressed to: "President Bannon, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue". Hard to say how much this contributed to Bannon’s demise, but he was compelled to leave not long after this.
I did not realize that! Good to know.
excellent presentation last evening with simon. everyone should listen today if u missed it. also, fantastic reporting by lawrence o'donnell last nite on satan/fusk killing bi partisan funding bill. he really cheers me up and gives me hope! satan will have to lift the debt ceiling to give the oligarchs their tax gift! dems today should be telling all the people in states hurt by natural disasters that repubs killed $100B for relief efforts. name the states. do it locally. let them all know who killed the bill. everytime they hurt the american people the dems need to shine a spotlight and megaphone on it!
Regarding Musk, I saw a suggestion elsewhere this morning, I believe in TCinLA's substack that we now should be referring to President Musk and Vice President Trump. That reflects who is actually in charge, and it would drive Frump crazy.
No ceiling for Trump’s hypocrisy!
For years, Republicans have been professing concern about the national debt – and, during every budget negotiation, Republican legislators have used their unwillingness to raise the debt ceiling as a cudgel to extract budget concessions from the Democrats.
Now suddenly Trump demands Congress *eliminate* the debt ceiling?? This is an alarming signal that he has some very bad plans for America’s economy – and for your economy and my economy.
The headline on the front page of the local newspaper today is “Trusting in Trump - President Elects’ Voters Mostly Trust in His Cabinet Picks.” The goal of many people who voted Trump this time around (not just MAGA) is to shake up the government and create change. I have my doubts that these understand how much hurt this may actually cause them personally. Unfortunately, I think that for many people who voted for Trump, the only way that they will believe he is bad for them is through adverse consequences and personal pain. I often wonder if the chips need to fall where they may before anything others say or do regarding Trump’s destructiveness matters. If people think Kash Patel and Pete Hegsforth are good nominees, then I think consequences may be the only thing Trump voters may understand.
Also, I haven’t seen much commentary from Democratic leaders about where we go from here regarding cultural issues. According to Ruy Teixeira in “The Free Press” , one exit poll sited that people could not relate to Democrats on cultural issues as the third greatest reason for why they voted Trump. The economy and immigration were first and second. Teixeira says “Because many of today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues to be real issues. Instead, they see them as fictions, distractions, or expressions of bigotry that are to be opposed, not indulged.” He says Democrats are missing the message voters sent them.
Simon - any thoughts on this perspective?
You would do well to ignore Ruy Teixeira. AS Stewart Stevens said, we lost an election, but we were not wrong. Propaganda was probably worse this election than ever before. Many voters thought we were in a recession, that immigrants were committing lots of violent crime, and that Harris was shaping up to be a woke blue haired trans advocate ( Sam Harris' characterization, not mine ). But hey, I'm sure pet owners all over the country are feeling better about their cats and dogs......
"people could not relate to Democrats on cultural issues"
The cultural frame / layer is critically important in times where we hear things like "culture wars." These are truly amazing times.
The Fox audience cannot be penetrated. Same applies to other radical right platforms.
So how will Dems connect the dots to help
Trump followers see that all of the coming calamity is of their choosing? They are responsible for the misery and hardship
they invited upon themselves. But they probably are incapable and/or unwilling to make the connections?
How will Dems reach the victims of the leader they will always glorify?